About

I am a Hong Kong-based risks mitigation consultant covering the Asian region. My practice also includes copywriting and copyediting services for corporate and institutional clients, on both demand and retainer basis.

My passion in writing and journalism has also led me to a regular “Discreetly” column with The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong. I also contribute to the online news portal AsiaSentinel.com and now this blog. Here you will find a selected collection of my articles from the past, my Discreetly column and also occasional impromptu musings and comments.

My main topics of interest include privacy, surveillance, spies craft, industrial espionage, cyber security, electronic gadgets, risks management, corporate governance and commercial crimes/frauds/scandals which led to the name “Shhh-cretly” of this blog.

I’m also an award-winning former business journalist specializing in investigating and writing exposés on commercial crimes. Prior to that, I was an economist with a Swiss financial institution and risks mitigation specialist with a global advisory firm.

I hope you enjoy my blog and look forward to your comments.

Cheers,

Vanson Soo

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Shhh-cretly Quote of the Week

The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.

Do you still have faith in cyber-security firms – recall the recent story about the Hacking Team?

Consider this: A Cyber-security firm known as Tiversa scams potential and ex-clients into memberships by hacking into their servers as a scare tactic to increase profits for Tiversa. Tiversa was brought before the Washington D.C. courthouse in May to explain their scam.

It was much worse than previously reported: more than 21 million people were “swept up in a colossal breach of government computer systems that was far more damaging than initially thought”. Find out more from the New York Times.

I have had the privilege to listen live in Hong Kong recently on technology futurist Brett King’s talk about a hot topic, FinTech – a contraction and combination of the words Financial and Technology, a ubiquitous term for any technology applied to financial services.

In sum, King’s argument is that with the way the millennials (those born at and after the turn of this century) get information and change the way they interact with the rest of the world, the financial services industry have to think seriously about FinTech because technology is re-defining the way we think about financial services. Put candidly, King ponders why are retail banks becoming more and more like Apple stores?

I like to share with you this interview on the new book by James Risen, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter at the center of one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades who exposed the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency as early as 2005, 8 years before the Snowden revelations. Risen also hit headlines after being on Obama’s blacklist after he was threatened with prison terms by the Justice Department for refusing to reveal the source of one of his stories.

The BBC plans to publish a regularly updated list of articles removed from the search engine Google following the controversial “right to be forgotten rule”.

Google has so far received some 153,000 requests which have involved about half a million different link and 40 percent of these links have been removed. However, according to associate professor David Glance, director of the Center for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia:

“… there is a great deal of concern about the sorts of things that are being removed. So, for example, information about former company directors have been removed. So various people are now asking for that type of information to be restored because it’s part of the public record and important information when you are considering the effectiveness or the background of a company or the directors.”

A group of hackers known as the “Sandworm Team”, allegedly from Russia, has found a fundamental flaw in Microsoft Windows (a zero-day vulnerability impacting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and Windows Server 2008 and 2012) and turned it into a Russian cyber-espionage campaign targeting NATO, European Union, telecommunications and energy sectors – by pulling emails and documents off computers from NATO, Ukrainian government groups, Western European government officials, and also the energy sector and telecommunications firms, according to new research from iSight Partners, a Dallas-based cybersecurity firm.

Some 43 veterans of Israel’s secret spy agency Unit 8200 has written an open letter of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and head of the Israeli army accusing the agency of targeting and collecting data of innocent Palestinians for political and not national security purposes, adding that they have a “moral duty” not to “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians”.

This relates well to a New York Times article last week about how the special relationship between the US and Israel – including how the NSA shared “unminimized”, ie. raw data (on Arab-and Palestinian-Americans with relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories) with Israel unlike the sharing of only “minimized” data with other countries – has motivated Edward Snowden to blow the whistle last year.